Stigma of being unmassaged in Thailand

The passport arrived at last, in my 41st year. Before I got it, I was made to prove my mettle by crawling under the barbed wire of demeaning verification. Some of the questions asked were: “What! You haven’t been abroad YET? Not even to NEPAL? Did you have any dealings with Rajat Gupta? Are you very poor?” This interrogation was carried out not by police but by some family members.

For a few of my kin, arrival in life seems to be signified by thrilled panting on a massage table in Thailand. Of course, these people represent only a minority of snobs in India who think that without overseas jaunts, a person will always remain socially unpolished. But such people appear to be ubiquitous. They will post pictures of themselves posing with Mona Lisa at Louvre. Write learned blogs about the best deals at Dubai duty free. And when their capacity to confide is improved by single malt from Singapore, they will slide their cellphones close to your face. While scanning the horizon vigilantly for a possible ambush from wives, they will show the jerky documentary they recorded at Las Vegas strip clubs.

During one such encounter — when I was delighting in the sixth round of my host’s Jack Daniels from Jakarta — I felt obliged to compliment him for his scholarly travelogue. His lecture covered a prodigious range: from places in Kenya that served garlic-less Indian food to the availability of sexual recreation in Scandinavia. I told him: “You are a Renaissance Man!” The term is a tribute to a person whose brain is as big as the Heathrow airport. It emerged in the period spanning 14th to 16th century, which produced such versatile, history-shaping thinkers as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Galileo Galilei. The period was called Renaissance (rebirth) because it marked a renewed interest in the ideas of ancient Greece and Rome.

To get back to the story, my host — who had recently returned from a holiday in Venice — seemed to know all about Renaissance. “No, no, no! I am not a Renaissance Man!” he said, spraying bits of garlic-less kebab on me. “I am very aware that it is a Marriott brand but I am a Ramada Man because I get corporate discounts there.”

That was the moment I decided to fight back the snobbery with haute pretentiousness. I got my chance a couple days ago when a distant relative rang me unexpectedly. “Now that you have a passport, you must visit Disneyland when you go to America,” he said. I affected hauteur. “What an imbecile idea,” I said. “If I go to America, I will trace Route 66.”

The great Christopher Hitchens’s essay, ‘The Ballad of Route 66′, invokes a John Steinbeck tour de force from ‘The Grapes of Wrath’. “Highway 66 is the main migrant road…waving gently up and down on the map,” Steinbeck writes. “From Mississippi to Bakersfield — over the red lands and the gray lands, twisting up into the mountains, crossing the Divide and down into the bright and terrible desert, and across the desert to the mountains again, and into the rich California valleys.”

On his drive through the route, Hitchens reaches Glenrio on the Texas-New Mexico border. The ghost town yields a haunting Hitch flourish: “This used to be the site of the celebrated ‘First and Last Motel in Texas’, and some shards of the old sign can still be seen on the abandoned skeleton of the building, which is a dried-out mausoleum preserving the faint redolence of countless cross-border fornications.”

This is the kind of prose, I told the relative on the phone, which makes me want to learn driving. Trust Hitch to transform even me, a man with a billion frequent-traveller miles on autorickshaws. “So I will not waste money puking on a Disneyland roller-coaster,” I said. Neither Hitch’s words nor Steinbeck’s had provoked a response. But the mention of “money” drew the hiss of a delighted King Cobra who realizes that his dinner is cornered and quivering. “So do you have the money to drive on Route sixty-whatever?” I was asked.

Well, as shown by Albert Speer — Hitler’s architect — travel can be a zero-cost pilgrimage that safeguards against insanity. When Speer was imprisoned for twenty years, maddening despair pursued him unrelentingly. He managed to keep miles ahead of his tormentor by superimposing grand itineraries on his prison campus’s walking path. “I am already deep in India,” he writes of one excursion in his cage, “and according to the plan, I will be in Benaras in five months.”

Though my interlocutor sensibly dismissed my anecdote as philosophizing that can’t help in securing visas, I am glad I reflected on travel. To be decently pretentious, one has to read at least a little bit. And my reading, incited — I must admit — by the fact that I envy those who have visited wonderful places overseas, has revealed vistas as exquisite as the ones I imagine tourists in Switzerland relish. When I eventually summit Thailand, I may end up buying perfumes and whiskeys. But I have vowed to myself that on the massage table, I will meditate on E M Forster’s mantra, “Only connect”. That epigraph in ‘Howards End’ suggests that one can broaden one’s own sympathies by establishing human connections with others. That has not worked with certain neighbours in Ahmedabad, but in Thailand, with my blood circulation cranked up, I may get lucky.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Kannan Somasundaram is an senior assistant editor at the Times of India in Ahmedabad. After graduating from New Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia in 1994, he began his career in journalism as a film and book reviewer. The amorality and violence of modern cinema and literature prepared him well for subsequent stints with news desks dealing with Indian politics.

Kannan Somasundaram is an senior assistant editor at the Times of India in Ahmedabad. After graduating from New Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia in 1994, he b. . .